Today a giant clock placed in Trafalgar Square started counting down 500 days until the start of the London Olympics (BBC news 1), and 6.6 million Olympic tickets became available this morning (BBC news 2). But when I think about the victims of Japan Tohoku earthquake and Tsunami, I am not in a mood at all to celebrate all these Olympic stuffs. The media coverage is still big here in UK, as problems at nuclear power stations haven’t been solved yet. However, strangely the media rarely talks about help that ordinary people can do, rather than official aid from each country. I think I saw more TV commercials and newspaper ads, as well as information for charity on news programs for Haiti earthquake and Boxing Day Tsunami. On the other hand, I feel like Americans, including celebs, are more supportive and helpful, and more information for aids in the US – probably because USA and Japan are important allies.

There are many Japanese living in UK, trying to help the victims, not only donating to charities, but also organizing charity events and concerts, fundraising on a street, exchanging support information on local web community boards and SNS such as facebook and Mixi (Japan’s largest SNS community). The video above was taken from BBC London news, covering Japanese students making Origami cranes and fundraising in front of LSE. I wish the circle of support will spread, not only within Japanese community in UK, but also to British public and people from other countries – yes, Japan is the third largest economy in the world and you may think help is unnecessary, but the damage is enormous with astronomical cost or recovery, and the government has huge debt and the country is still in long-lasting recession. Of course Japanese government and people must help with each other too, but I am afraid it is not enough. Many people in the affected areas are elderly as young generation left for bigger cities and can’t afford to pay 30-year morgage, and fishermen and farmers on the coast are not millionaires as well…

↓ Here is additional information for help. Please also check yesterday’s entry for more information.

I’ve never heard of ‘Spacelocker‘ and it was a huge mistake to register with them – I just thought it was one of the SNS like Facebook and MySpace, and it should be OK if my friends registered. I regretted right way as soon as I saw their badly designed ‘my page’ (photo above). I should have assumed it when I saw equally cheesy sign-up page. Well, it was a small mistake that I signed up a SNS for teenagers and just canceled it. But as I searched internet about Spacelocker and I was completely freaked out (chceck article1 and article2). The problem was I signed up with the form on the left – I thought I had to use this form if you use yahoo, gmail, AOL, and hotmail. And I understood the message in the form “and spacelocker will invite your friends” as I could invite a friend among the people in my address book of my mail account after registration, if I wanted to, like a Facebook. But I was all wrong. I set up my password the same as my mail account, and as soon as I finished registration, Spacelocker accessed to my account and got all the registered mail address, and sent an invitation to all of them, from my friends and families to my former boss and some others I don’t want to contact to, without my consent!!! It was too late to regret. Now I understand why I received the invitations from my friends whom I thought would never invite me to that kind of site. It is like a cyber fraud but according to Spacelocker, we are a bunch of idiots who ‘agreed’ their terms and conditions when we registered, or illiterates who don’t understand English (site2). I feel really sorry for all of who received the invitation, and hope they just put it in a trash as a spam. For your reference, Spacelocker is “a European-based company headquartered on the Smart Island country of Malta, with a communications office in London”. Please be careful if you receive an Spacelocker invitation from your friend…